Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie was a French historian whose work was mainly focused upon Languedoc in the Ancien Régime, particularly the history of the peasantry. One of the leading historians of France, Le Roy Ladurie has been called the "standard-bearer" of the third generation of the Annales school and the "rock star of the medievalists", noted for his work in social history.
François Marie Tanguy Prigent was a French Socialist politician who became a resistance fighter during World War II (1939–45). He was Minister of Agriculture from September 1944 to October 1947 and was Minister of Veterans and War Victims from February 1956 to June 1957.
Henri-Auguste d'Halluin, known by the pseudonym Henri Dorgères, was a French political activist. He is best known for the Comités de Défense Paysanne which he set up in the interwar period.
The Fédération nationale des syndicats d'exploitants agricoles is a French umbrella organisation charged with the national representation of 20,000 local syndicat agricoles (agricultural unions)) and 22 regional federations.
The French Agrarian and Peasant Party was a French political party founded in 1927 during the French Third Republic by Gabriel Fleurent.
Count Hervé Budes de Guébriant was a French agricultural engineer.
Auguste Alain Georges Pernot was a conservative French lawyer and politician. He was a deputy and then a senator before and during World War II (1939–45). He was Minister of Public Works in 1929–30, Minister of Justice in 1934–35, Minister of Blockade in 1939–40 and briefly Minister of the French Family and Public Health in June 1940. After World War II (1939–45) he was again a senator from 1946 to 1959. Throughout his career Pernot was a vocal pronatalist, pushing for government policies that would support the family and encourage higher birth rates to counter the demographic crisis in France. He believed that women should be encouraged to remain at home to raise children.
Jacques Jules Marie Joseph Le Roy Ladurie was a French agriculturalist and politician. He played a leading role in agricultural syndicates in the 1920s and 1930s. During World War II (1939–1945) he was Minister of Agriculture in Vichy France for several months in 1942. He later participated in the French Resistance. After the war he was a deputy for the Calvados from 1951 to 1955, and again from 1958 to 1962.
Louis Salleron was a French author, journalist and Catholic theoretician. He was right-wing, with monarchist sympathies, and an advocate of agricultural corporatism. During the early years of the Vichy Regime in World War II (1939–45) he played a leading role in establishing the Peasant Corporation. He continued to publish books and articles after the war, and was an outspoken opponent of the Vatican II reforms to the Catholic church.
The Peasant Corporation was a Paris-based organization created in Vichy France to support a corporatist structure of agricultural syndicates. The Ministry of Agriculture was unenthusiastic and undermined the corporation, which was launched with a provisional structure in 1941 that was not finalized until 1943. By then the small farmers and farm workers had become disillusioned since the corporation had maintained the privileged position of landowners and had not protected them from demands by the increasingly unpopular German occupiers. The corporation, which was never effective, was dissolved after the liberation of France in September 1944.
French peasants were the largest socio-economic group in France until the mid-20th century. The word peasant, while having no universally accepted meaning, is used here to describe subsistence farming throughout the Middle Ages, often smallholders or those paying rent to landlords, and rural workers in general. As industrialization developed, some peasants became wealthier than others and drove investment in agriculture. Rising inequality and financial management in France during the late 18th century eventually motivated peasants to revolt and destroy the feudal system. Today peasants could no longer be said to exist as an economic or social group in France, although many attempts have been made to honor and preserve this traditional way of life.
The Comités de Défense Paysanne or Peasant Defense Committees was a network of radical agrarian groups France founded in 1929.
The Front paysan was a group founded in 1934 and consisted of:
A syndicat agricole is a French speaking farmers' union.
The Union centrale des syndicats agricoles was the French national body representing or farmers' unions. They were replaced by the Union nationale des syndicats agricoles.
Modeste Legouez (1908–1989) was a French farmer in Normandy and senator for Eure from 1959 to 1989.
Louis Guillon was a French agrarian leader and deputy for Vosges between 1932 and 1936.
Gabriel Fleurent d. June 1936 was the founder and leader of the French Agrarian and Peasant Party, a corporatist, right-wing populist and agrarian party.
Joseph Théodore Bilger (1905–1975) was an Alsatian Catholic agrarian activist and autonomist politician during the late years of the French Third Republic.
The General Confederation of Agriculture (CGA) was a short lived national association of syndicats agricoles to replace the Vichy regime's Corporation Paysanne after the Liberation of France.
